Elektra Records founder creates iPad app for The Doors

The back catalogue of rock band The Doors has been brought to life with an iPad app, created by 81-year-old Jac Holzman, who founded their label Elektra Records.

Fans of The Doors no longer need to dust off their vinyl, as the 81-year-old man who signed them to a label in 1966 has preserved their back catalogue in an app.

Jac Holzman started Elektra Records as a teenager and his ambition to push the boundaries of music and technology hasn’t waned. For the past year, Holzman has been working seven days a week to create the iPad app with a small team. He sees it as a potential way for record companies to provide digital catalogues instead of boxed sets.

Holzman told The New York Times: “I’m always interested in how I can take technology and make it work for music.”

The app, which went on sale on Monday on American iTunes, offers interactive insider stories about the band from David Fricke, senior editor of Rolling Stone magazine, as well as a graphic novel and written contributions and video from Patti Smith, Hunter S Thompson and others.

Fans can connect to their iTunes through a “music room”, which lists The Doors’ LPs and samples as well as lyrics to all of the songs, and links to social media. Already the app is averaging four and a half out of five stars in reviews.

Holzman said: “I should have known that I would get so wrapped up in this, that it would take a year. But critical to being successful in this kind of stuff is just a love of the process itself.”

Elektra was formed in 1950, and Holzman released records from folk musicians such as Judy Collins and Oscar Brand before being one of the first to sign up psychedelic rock bands in the mid-1960s, including Love and The Stooges as well as The Doors.

Holzman has been excited by digitised media since the 1970s, when he was introduced to the laser disc, and his enthusiasm for online music is unusual among the major industry players, which he says reacted to digital “with a kind of indifference and fear”. Speaking of Napster, the file-sharing site which contributed to plummeting record sales in the late 1990s, Holzman says: “it drove everybody crazy but me. I thought Napster was a missed opportunity. It could have been a boon for singles.”

Source: The Telegraph